“I am listening.”
“You are probably phant’sying parallels, similitudes, between what was done to your Abigail and what was done to my Jean-Jacques. But put such thoughts out of your mind. Abigail is a slave, held against her will, misused. A prisoner. This is no longer true of my Jean-Jacques. He is better off as Johann in Leipzig than he was as Jean-Jacques in Versailles. The captors of Abigail are imbeciles—guilty of a failure of imagination. By keeping her in a miserable estate, they make you miserable, ’tis true—but your path is clear: It is the path so familiar from myths and legends, the path of righteous fury, revenge, retribution, rescue. Lothar von Hacklheber has done something infinitely more cruel. He has made my boy happy. If I were able, somehow, to go to Leipzig and steal him back, the child would be terrified and miserable. And perhaps justly so, for when I got back I should have no choice but to deposit him in some Church orphanage outside of Versailles to be raised by nuns and made over into a Jesuit priest.”
“Hoosh. I am glad for my own sake, madame, that I was not anywhere near you at the moment when you first came to understand this…”
“...”
“Why are you staring at me thus? It makes me think I had better put my clothes back on—perhaps arm myself as well.”
“...”
“Are you only just understanding it now!?”
“If an idea is terrible enough, the mind is unwilling to swallow it in one go, but regurgitates and chews it like cud many times before it goes down for good. This is one that I have been chewing on for more than a year. It took me several weeks, after Jean-Jacques was abducted, for me to establish his whereabouts. By the time I could formulate even a hasty and ill-conceived plan to go fetch him back, I was pregnant with Lucien. It is only now that Lucien has been born, and I have recovered from it, that I can consider taking any steps in the matter of Jean-Jacques. And now it is too late. There. Done. I have swallowed it.”
“All right. I could see this coming. Put your head there on my breastbone, madame, I’ll hold you in my arms, so you don’t collapse, or come undone. Sob all you want, I have you, no one’s looking, we have time.”
“...”
“...”
“...”
“Now that you mention it, my lady, to have the love of my life enslaved and raped by a syphilitic lord does seem quite mild by comparison.”
“I cannot tell if you are being sarcastic.”
“Neither can I, madame, I honestly cannot. But tell me this: If you cannot get your boy back without destroying his welfare, then what do you intend?”
“In pondering this very question I have hesitated, and in hesitating I have only made matters worse. Soon I shall act.”
“And what is the end you have fixed on?”
“I mean to end up, in some sense, with my boot on the neck of Lothar von Hacklheber, and him looking up helpless into my eyes.”
“Well. Well! Let me just say that the last bloke who had me in such a fix was the Earl of Upnor, and—”
“My powers of organization exceed those of the late Upnor by a significant margin, and so I intend to arrange matters so that I will not end up being beaten to death with a stick by an Irishman.”
“Ah. That is good news.”
“Tell me everything about what is being prepared around Cherbourg, Sergeant Shaftoe, whether you intend for it to be relayed to Marlborough, or not.”
“Very well. But how will this intelligence be of any help to you in your machinations against—oh, never mind. You’re glowering at me.”
“You speak so knowingly of my machinations, as if I were some ridiculous figure in an Italian opera, who does naught but machinate; yet if you could follow me about, you would observe a tired mother who follows her husband from Versailles to St.-Malo, and suckles her infant, and occasionally throws a dinner party, and perhaps once or twice a year fucks a cryptologist in a carriage, or a sergeant in a haystack.”
“How will this lead to your boot on Lothar’s throat again? Never mind, never mind. I’m certain I’d never understand it anyway.”
“You are in good company. If I do it right, not even Lothar will understand it.”
Chateau d’Arcachon, St.-Malo, France
11 APRIL 1692